


with a wide open country in our hearts

by capalxii



Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-12
Updated: 2014-09-12
Packaged: 2018-02-17 01:29:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2291927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/capalxii/pseuds/capalxii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Where’ve you been?” One day Jamie shows up again. Set a few months post series, with flashbacks mostly pre-series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	with a wide open country in our hearts

One day not long after the end of it all, Jamie shows up when the rain is pelting down.

His hair is wet and flat against his brow, but it still curls at the ends, black with a little more gray than Malcolm recalls above eyes as blue as the sky is not. Like he stole all that blue sky and put it inside himself, and something bright is looking back at Malcolm, something brighter than anything he ever remembers existing. He wears a coat nicer than the ugly anorak from the last time Malcolm had seen him, his boots are a nicer class of boots than the shoes he used to wear, but taken together he still looks as shabby as always, as rolled-out-of-bed and comfortable as a care-worn jumper as he’d looked years ago when he’d left the last time.

“You gonna let me in, or,” Jamie says. He nudges past Malcolm before he can answer, leaving the memory of wet and chill against Malcolm’s shoulder.

*

The first thing he remembers—it’s not the first time they’d met. He’s back home in Glasgow but his time there is short. It’s raining, and they’ve made a run for cover, finding themselves in a doorway minutes after the sky’s broken open. His jacket was too thin to begin with and is soaked through now, and Jamie’s thick dirty colorless old coat isn’t fairing much better. Standing together, at least a little bit out of the rain until it decides to come in sideways, Malcolm pulls out a half-empty pack of cigarettes, taps one out, hands the pack to Jamie and murmurs, “Give us a light, love.”

Jamie grunts with his lips already around a cigarette. His lighter sputters once, twice, and then produces a flame. “When are you headed back to London?”

In the doorway, Malcolm can feel a little of Jamie’s heat and he crowds closer. “Saturday. Figure I’ll find a room somewhere, start looking for a flat.”

“That’s quick.” Jamie’s not making conversation, not really, although Malcolm can hear the valiant attempt to keep it light in his voice.

“Yeah, well. So was the election.” He nudges Jamie’s shoulder with his own, taps some ash to the ground. “Come with me.” It’s not the first time he’s asked. It’s 1994. It will, however, be the last.

Jamie takes a drag on his own cigarette, lips pink around the filter and cheeks hollowed in as the ashen tip flares bright orange momentarily. There’s rain on his skin, droplets on those ridiculous eyelashes around the biggest, sweetest—yes, sweetest, when he wants to be—eyes that Malcolm has ever seen or ever wants to, and when he finally blinks up at Malcolm, it’s enough that Malcolm forgets the chill in his own bones. “Convince me,” he says.

It doesn’t take much, not really; he’d already been half convinced and halfway packed when Malcolm makes it to Jamie’s room. The next morning is like a different planet. It’s a rare day when the skies don’t match the grimy gray buildings around Jamie’s flat. But the light filtering through the curtains this morning is golden, the color of butter, catching against the cream of Jamie’s skin and reddening his dark brown hair. Malcolm notices nothing except the quiet laugh as Jamie pushes himself up above him, the bright smile before he leans down and presses himself against Malcolm’s bare skin. And when the radio clicks on at exactly 6:45, Jamie’s up and stumbling across the room, the early light hitting his naked body like something nearly animal, something culled up from ancestral memory. It doesn’t take much at all.

*

These days, Malcolm sort of lets things happen. Jamie is wringing himself out, his coat discarded by the door, boots kicked off and toppled over in a small puddle.

“What’s for dinner?” Jamie asks; his head is under a towel, he’s scrubbing the rain away, and when he reveals himself his hair has turned wild and mad.

Malcolm shrugs. “Takeaway.”

“Eh.” Malcolm sort of lets Jamie rummage through his fridge, lets him find the cans of Fanta and the older takeaway boxes and not much else, before Jamie flops down on his couch. “Where the fuck have you been?”

It’s a stupid question to ask—Malcolm has been here. It’s Jamie who’d been gone for years, with a goodbye-cake bought on the office entertainment account, with Malcolm asking one more time if there wasn’t something he could do or say, and Jamie, oblivious, laughing and giving him a hug and telling him to take care. “I haven’t been anywhere,” he says, his voice a little sharp. “Where’ve you been?”

Jamie makes a face; there are lines there that Malcolm doesn’t remember, around his eyes, around his mouth. He can’t wrap his brain around Jamie aging. “Had to go back home.”

*

“I have to go back home.” Jamie looks even younger than normal, in that oversized jacket that had been his older brother’s at one point. He scuffs his shoe against the wood floor and hefts his backpack as he heads to the door. “Just for the week. Maybe come back a little early, I dunno.”

It’s 1989, and the next day, Malcolm taps his foot nervously under the table, dreck coffee in the disposable cup in front of him doing nothing but warming his hands. London is bigger and bolder than he’d expected—he’d been there before, but never for work, never at one of the hardest papers in the country, never waiting for word from a source that, yes, he will get documents on the proposed defense build-up and purely coincidental proposed cuts to milk subsidies for poor kiddies. He wishes, not for the first time, to be back in Glasgow. He knows Glasgow corruption. He knows he can get whatever information he wants there. He knows exactly how far it is by every mode of transport to the man who has already left.

The folder is dropped on the sticky cafe table by a man who walks off immediately after. Malcolm knows his shoes; he knows the certain gait with which he walks. Middle aged gent—fucking old by Malcolm’s standards, but he’s willing to be generous given what he’s seeing as he skims the grainy photocopies.

He stops tapping his feet, more out of distraction by what’s in front of him than anything else. Malcolm could know London corruption, if he wants. It is 1989 and he’s young enough that he has all the time in the universe to sink his claws into the pavement here, to sink his teeth into the pulse points.

He still finds himself in Glasgow that weekend, and every weekend that he can make it after, when the one-week promise turns longer than one week and far less promise-ful.

*

A text message buzzes his phone and he flicks it away, sets the phone on silent. Jamie raises both eyebrows at that. “Really?”

“It’s not important.”

“That never used to matter.”

“Well.” The phone lands on the table with a quiet thud. “Different things don’t matter now.”

“I watched,” Jamie says. “The inquiry? Every bit of it.”

In the end, his lawyers had performed magic and his sparkling new book deal would pay for it. “Then you know that doesn’t matter either.”

“Where the fuck have you been?” Jamie is looking at him with something he doesn’t recognize. Jamie had been the one who’d gone. Jamie had been the one who’d gone. Jamie had been the one who’d gone with a smile and it wasn’t supposed to have mattered.

*

The first time Jamie had left, it had been after a fight and it had mattered a great deal.

It’s 1999 and it’s Malcolm, really, who is at fault, but they’ve both said enough that the fault lines are blurred at this point. It’s this job and this city; it’s the hours. It’s the can’t-sleep, won’t-eat, not-in-the-workplace triptych that eventually wears them down until they decide they have to be something else. But at least they’re together, there is still that, and if Malcolm doesn’t wake up to see milky-gray early morning light against Jamie’s skinny arms anymore, it’s fine because at least Malcolm can still watch the fire in him when he’s rallying the office, can still depend on him to silently step in and slip the burden from Malcolm’s shoulders onto his own. He can live without the warmth in his bed. He’d left and it had mattered because he’d somehow stayed, too.

But then it’s 2012, July, and Jamie had left for a second time. He’d left years ago, and now a policeman was talking to Malcolm from across a desk. The second time he’d left, it wasn’t supposed to have mattered but it had mattered a great deal more, because Malcolm had left around the same time, and the man seated next to his lawyer wonders if anyone had even noticed.

*

Jamie is looking at him with something he starts to recognize and he cuts it by saying, “You saw everything?”

“Yeah.”

“And you stayed away until it was safe.” His voice is harder now, almost like it used to be. “Until you knew I wouldn’t be poison to the touch.”

“If you want to think that,” Jamie says. He smiles infuriatingly, those lines that Malcolm hadn’t remembered deepening around his eyes. But then the smile falters a little and he adds, “I didn’t know if you wanted me around.”

It’s the second stupid question Jamie’s asked in the span of maybe ten minutes, stupid enough that it must be a terrible lie, and it’s enough for Malcolm to run a hand through his hair and say, “Right. Go. Get out.”

“I’m not going anywhere. Not ‘til you tell me what happened.”

Some time ago, he might have fought with Jamie until he’d left, but these days Malcolm sort of lets things happen because he’s too tired to do anything else. He rubs a hand over his face. “Nothing happened. I fucked up, that’s all. Will you go?”

Jamie is looking at him with the firm understanding that Malcolm had gone years ago, but without the understanding that maybe he’d been the one to take him. But he gets up and straightens the fleece Malcolm’s wearing that doesn’t need straightening, and says, “I’m staying right here.”

*

There is a lie-in, in 2002. The midnight before, it’s raining, they are at work, and they break their agreement just the once because Fleming has been pushed out. Jamie pulls Malcolm into a cupboard and Malcolm lets him.

He’s already exhausted to his bones, but with Jamie’s teeth nipping at his lower lip, he thinks he might be able to drag himself forward for a few more years. There is a lie-in, in 2002, where Malcolm blinks awake to find Jamie beside him for the first time in ages, and he decides that if he’s going to allow himself to be tired, he should be tired in that bed with that man.

*

Malcolm looks up from Jamie’s hands on the hem of his fleece and simply says like a confession, “I’m tired.”

“I know,” Jamie says, just as simply. “That’s why I came.”

*

There is almost a lie-in. The rain has been going off and on since the previous day, but a bit of light has slipped through the curtains and he’s as tired as he’s been for longer than he cares to think about. He thinks about staying in his bed, but pulls on some clothes in the dark and pads downstairs.

The light is seeping into the living room as well, where Jamie takes up the entire couch, his arms crossed over his stomach in sleep and his head tilted forward until his chin hits his chest. It can’t be comfortable for most people, but this is Jamie, who had always found a way to sleep in the most awkward of spaces. He doesn’t wake up until he hears Malcolm in the kitchen starting the kettle, and even then he stirs only to roll onto his side. It’s not until the tea is on the table in front of him that Jamie swings his legs to the floor and starts to half-sleep with his chin in his hand and his elbow perched on his knee. “Malc?” he mumbles.

Malcolm sits beside him; there’s a hand quickly on his neck, then his head, blindly smoothing down his hair. He is tired, just like he is always tired, but there’s a weight gone at the touch and something else taking its place. Jamie pulls him back to bed after breakfast, and curls his body around Malcolm’s like he’s bigger than he looks. “’M not goin’,” Jamie mumbles, his stubble against Malcolm’s neck, “an’ neither are you.”

*

He will wake up to the morning light on Jamie’s skin for every day after this one. And he will think: if he should be tired, at least he should be tired in this bed, with this man.

**Author's Note:**

> Title courtesy of the Boss, "No Surrender." The version off Live '75-'85 might have had a lot to do with the writing of this fic.


End file.
